I’d like to show you how you can embed a complete OneNote notebook from OneDrive for Business. The full notebook is embedded, including the hamburger menu that lets you access the notebook sections and section groups. The instructions here only apply to OneDrive for Business (Office 365), not to OneDrive for Consumers (onedrive.com).

Big news: IFTTT has just opened the Inoreader Channel to the public. Anyone can now create and share IFTTT Recipes based on Triggers and Actions in Inoreader.

The Inoreader Channel on IFTTT is now live.

What is Inoreader?

Inoreader is a web-based content reader created by Innologica, a software development company from Bulgaria. Inoreader has been available since 2013. Feature-wise, Inoreader goes far beyond the basic functionality of typical RSS readers. What makes Inoreader stand out is the steady pace at which the development team has been adding powerful features, such as:

Folder export – export your feeds, tags, likes, stars, Active Searches and Saved Web Pages as RSS feed and HTML Clip. An example of an Inoreader HTML Clip is at the bottom of this blog post. It will show a dynamically updated list of blog posts covering the announcement of IFTTT’s new Inoreader channel, based on the web pages that I tag in my Inoreader account.

Every feed folder and Bundle can be exported as OPML

Follow social accounts and search queries from Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and VKontakte

Blazing-fast subscription management with batch mode

Advanced search – search within the scope of a feed, of a folder, among all of your own subscriptions or even among all subscriptions from all Inoreader users

Active Search – be notified by RSS or by notification when a stored search query renders a new result

Feed Bundles – create and share a group of feeds that others users can subscribe to

OPML reading list subscriptions – subscribe to a remotely hosted OPML file. When a new feed appears on the remote OPML file, that same feed will be added to your account.

What can you do with the new Inoreader Channel on IFTTT?

Inoreader offers event Triggers and Actions that you can use to construct IFTTT Recipes. If IFTTT is all new to you, then check the IFTTT WTF page for detailed information.

Triggers fire when something happens in an IFTTT channel. Examples of Inoreader Triggers could be the event of articles being starred for reading later (manual), or the event that a new Active Search result has become available (automatic). IFTTT Actions are the consequence of such events. Examples of Inoreader Actions could be to subscribe to an RSS feed, or to save and tag an article.

Of course Inoreader’s capabilities really start to shine if you combine an Inoreader Trigger or Action with any of the 180+ available IFTTT Channels.

Inoreader Triggers

The following 12 Triggers are available on the Inoreader Channel in IFTTT. Click on the hyperlink for each Trigger for an overview of related IFTTT Recipes and to see the list of Recipe Ingredients that you can choose from.

Recipe that saves a YouTube video marked as “Watch Later” in Inoreader, with optional Tag.

Inoreader Actions

The following 5 Actions are available on the Inoreader Channel in IFTTT. Click on the hyperlink for each Action for an overview of related IFTTT Recipes and to see the list of Recipe Ingredients that you can choose from.

Inoreader Ingredients

Every Inoreader Trigger and Action comes with its own set of Ingredients. Some Triggers and Actions have many Ingredients to choose from, some only a few. To see the list of Recipe Ingredients that you can choose from, go to the overview of Inoreader Triggers and Actions and click on the name of a Trigger or an Action. Some common Inoreader Ingredients are Subscription URL, Subscription RSS URL, Article Title, Tag Name and Folder Name.

Ingredients for the “New starred article” Trigger on the Inoreader IFTTT Channel

Why is the new Inoreader Channel on IFTTT so significant?

There are a few other feed readers that have a Channel of their own on IFTTT, notably the Feedly Channel and the NewsBlur Channel. There’s also a generic Feed Channel from IFTTT itself that solely functions as a Trigger – it offers no Actions. The Feed Channel Triggers let you create a Recipe based on a new feed item appearing in an RSS feed that you specify. Note that this Feed Channel does not allow you to create or add to an RSS feed.

Compared to these other IFTTT Channels, the Inoreader Channel stands out because of the broad variety and power of the available event triggers and actions.

As you can see from the sample recipes, Inoreader integrates with many popular services and platforms. The ones I personally like the most are the integrations with the IFTTT Channels from Buffer, Email Digest, Microsoft OneNote, Google Drive Spreadsheet, YouTube Watch Later and IFTTT’s relatively new Do Button for iOS.

Is there still anything to be desired in the Inoreader IFTTT channel?

The Inoreader IFTTT Channel is already very balanced. If anything, I’d suggest that every Trigger relating to articles, web pages, feeds or Bundles would allow optional filtering by custom keyword. A useful additional Inoreader Action could be to trigger a Push Notification in the Inoreader mobile apps, if that’s possible.

Ever since the Microsoft Office Mix team announced that their PowerPoint 2013 add-in was now supporting closed captions, I’ve been wanting to try it out. I’m a very strong proponent of producing videos #WithCaptions and I thank the Office Mix Team wholeheartedly for acknowledging the importance of offering this courteous feature.

When I talked to Microsoft’s Preston Peine about his #OneNoteWithPreston series, he challenged me to go for it with his most recent Office Mix presentation “Class Notebooks with Shared Computers“. It so happens that Preston – through the Mix privacy settings – made the .PPTX source of his Office Mix presentation available for remixing, so I could just download that .PPTX file and open it in my own copy of PowerPoint 2013.

For those with little time on their hands, here’s the end result of my efforts:

Preston Peine’s Mix presentation:

Why closed captions?

There are multiple reasons to caption a video. I can think of these reasons:

as a courtesy to the hearing-impaired

to support non-native speakers

to promote better comprehension and retention

for SEO motives – captions are indexed by search engines

There’s an upcoming movement that promotes video captioning. It uses the #WithCaptions hashtag on social media. For more inspiration, watch the video in this recent Upworthy article Pretty Much a No-Brainer.

Using YouTube’s Subtitle Generator

To create the subtitles, I first uploaded the video version of my Office Mix to YouTube. Next, I opened the YouTube Video Manager onto the Subtitles and CC tab.

The Subtitles and CC tab of YouTube’s Video Manager

As you may know, YouTube provides automatic subtitles for videos in many languages, based on its speech recogntion technology. You can read more about this feature in YouTube Help – Automatic Captions.

The Automatic Captions feature of YouTube is the reason I first uploaded my video to YouTube. You don’t have to start from scratch, but can use the auto-generated captions provided by YouTube as your starting point.

Now, although YouTube does a fair job at speech recognition, the resulting subtitles still have to be checked and corrected manually – one by one. The YouTube caption editor is very easy to use, and probably couldn’t be made more efficient. Still, in my experience, correcting each of the captions remains a lot of work. It can help a great deal if you already have an accurate script available up front – in my case, I didn’t.

A tiny hurdle is that YouTube doesn’t natively support the file format .TTML that is required by Office Mix, so I ended up exporting the subtitles intermediately in the .SRT format. See which subtitle formats are supported by YouTube, and why the .TTML subtitle format that is required by Office Mix isn’t one of them, in YouTube Help – Upload subtitles and closed captions

Converting subtitle file format .SRT to .TTML

The next hurdle was how to convert YouTube’s closed-captioning format .SRT to .TTML, the format required by Office Mix. I discovered that the free video captioning service Amara lets you add existing .SRT subtitle files to imported YouTube videos, and also lets you export those subtitles again in .DFXP format. The DFXP subtitle format turns out to be compatible with .TTML.

Final step: adding the subtitles file to Office Mix Online

Office Mix Online requires the import file for your subtitles to have the .TTML file extension. Now that turned out easy enough: if you simply edit the file extension of the .DFXP file (downloaded from Amara) and rename it to .TTML, Office Mix Online will accept it.

Office Mix Online successfully imported the TTML file

Have you tried your hand at creating closed captions for Office Mix yet? How did you do it?

Introduction – from reading list to OPML

This is a long read. If you first want to get the gist of it, scan the paragraph headings and the pull quotes real quick. I hope you return here to find the golden nuggets.

People maintain categorized lists of web sites for many reasons. Combined with an RSS reader those reading lists let you keep track of news headlines and blog posts very efficiently. You may have come across reading lists in the sidebar of weblogs, where they are usually referred to as blogrolls, or just links.

If you export your list of favorite websites in the OPML file format, you can then share your reading list with other people. They can import the list into their preferred feed reader. There are quite a few ways anyone can create such an OPML file. This article provides links to various resources related to OPML, how to create OPML files and how to share them.

“OPML has become the de facto standard
for the convenient exchange of reading lists.” (2 / 6)

OPML iconRSS feeds for breakfast

Reading lists – useful but easily grow stale

OPML files are incredibly useful: by selecting several OPML files curated by topic experts you can quickly construct a personal news center around topics of interest. Regrettably the mechanism of importing a reading list has one major disadvantage: as soon as you add a reading list, it has in fact become a stale copy of the original. Future changes to the original reading list will not automatically be reflected in your copy of that list. To prevent this, OPML files should be automatically synchronized.

The InoReader dynamic OPML solution

This is where the new InoReader Dynamic Subscriptions feature comes in: it allows you to create dynamic subscriptions from any web-based reading list. When the original source of the reading list is updated, so does the InoReader version.

The first step is to import the reading list using the OPML file’s web address. After that, InoReader automatically keeps your copy of the reading list synchronized with its original source.

Creating dynamic OPML subscriptions

As you can also see from Synchronization option in this screenshot, InoReader can synchronize all changes to the OPML file (new additions and removals), or just new additions.

“InoReader synchronizes all changes to the OPML file” (3 / 6)

If a change in the remote OPML is detected, that event will trigger a notification event to indicate that one or more feeds have been added or removed:

The Memeorandum Leaderboard OPML just got updated.

In my experience adding a subscription is a very fast process. It mostly depends on whether InoReader has imported the feeds at some time in the past. On import, the feed reader checks whether the OPML file and individual feeds are valid. It also checks how active a feed is. Use dashboard gadgets to display lists of inactive feeds and of failing feeds:

InoReader dashboard gadgets display inactive and invalid feeds

All InoReader users (Basic, Plus and Pro levels) have access to the new dynamic OPML feature. Refresh frequencies depend on the user level, from once a day for the Basic level to once every hour for the for-pay levels. OPML subscriptions can also be manually refreshed.

“The new dynamic OPML feature is available to all InoReader users” (4 / 6)

InoReader OPML subscriptions can be automatically or manually refreshed.

Using InoReader to publish reading lists by topic

Like many other RSS platforms and feed readers on the market, InoReader lets you publish OPML files. What makes the InoReader approach different, is that it allows you to make web-based OPML files available for individual feed folders.

The significance of supporting dynamic OPML

Many people invest their time and energy into building and maintaining reading lists on topics they are most passionate about. It’s sad to see some of these efforts abandoned. However, once the reading lists are published and dynamically synchronized on the web, their authors can now be sure that other people always have access to the most up-to-date version of their reading lists. They will be more likely to keep their lists current, and all reading list users benefit.

Alltop offers OPML for hundreds of topics

You can find OPML files in various places on the web, sometimes deeply tucked away. A large collection of OPML files categorized by keyword is freely available on Alltop.com.

To get started with Alltop’s OPML files, first select the desired topic of interest from their website. There is a convenient full-page overview of all Alltop topics. For the purpose of this article, let’s choose Filmmaking.

Different flavors of OPML

If you use Google to find OPML files, note that you may also stumble across OPML files that cannot be used with an RSS feed reader because they contain outlines of plain text, not references to RSS feeds and their home pages.

“FeedShare deserves to become part of the
OPML- and feed-sharing ecosystem” (6 / 6)

OPML exchange site FeedShare.net

Early 2014 FeedShare http://feedshare.net was launched, a promising web service that is dedicated to the exchange of RSS feeds and OPML files. Anyone can submit their categorized reading lists to this website. Browse for topics at http://feedshare.net/tags.

See the screenshot below. This is how I submitted the OPML file for the RSS News Radar project to FeedShare.net. Sharing your reading list with the world can’t get much simpler than this. There’s no sign-up required, just two fields to fill in – a title and an OPML source. As soon as you’ve submitted your reading list, you’ll be given a unique URL that allows you to customize the reading list details and attach topic tags to it.

The FeedShare project is open-source. Original developer Arne @Holzenburg kindly invites you to join the effort and take the project to the next level. To turn it into an ecosystem for developers and users, FeedShare needs an API. Within the context of this article it is also relevant to note that once you’ve uploaded your OPML reading list to FeedShare.net, that copy itself does not magically get updated.

Create your own OPML file

If you have an InoReader account, then you can start creating topic reading lists straight away. Most other RSS readers offer an easy method to export all of your feed subscriptions in a single list. Some will host the OPML file for you through a direct URL, others do generate the output but don’t do the hosting for you. They require that you copy and paste the OPML output and save it to a file on your local hard drive. In that case you need to upload the local OPML file to a web-based file server, for example to OneDrive, DropBox, or Google Drive, so that the file becomes accessible online.

Make sure you enable sharing on your OPML file. Next, while you yourself are logged off from your feed reader, double check that the OPML file is indeed accessible through its web address and test it with your InoReader account.

OPML reading lists on the web (spreadsheet table)

Update June 9, 2014: You can now your own web-based OPML reading list to the new, public resource OPML Reading Lists on the Web. Note that the spreadsheet has multiple tabs. It is intended as a collaborative initiative. Please feel free to share the link and to retweet the Twitter announcement.

OPML tools and resources

Another way to create an OPML file is by starting with a simple list of websites that offer RSS feeds and using a web service to convert that list to an OPML file. Here are some OPML conversion tools and resources that make that process a lot easier:

Once you’ve created your OPML file, make sure that it’s accessible through a web URL.

Create a custom search engine from any OPML file

Now that you know where to find OPML files and how to create and share your own, why not grasp the opportunity and put them to good use? A fine use case for OPML files is to build a Google Custom Search Engine on the fly. Try this TechMeme Leaderboard Search Engine, based on the Techmeme Leaderboard.

Turning a web-based OPML into a search engine

If you observe the URL in your browser address bar, you can easily see how to substitute your own OPML file. Creating a custom search engine is just that simple. A powerful aspect of Google Custom Search Engines is that they show search results from the entire archive of a website – not just the recent history from its RSS feed. Google Custom Search Engines can be refined in many ways. To learn more about these options, visit and explore the Google Custom Search Engine website.

On the history of dynamic OPML

Dynamic reading list support isn’t newly invented by InoReader. Full credit for the concept goes to two pioneers in RSS, notably Dave Winer, and the deceased RSS reader Blogbridge.

Dave Winer – pioneer in RSS and inventor of OPML

Over the last decade or so, Dave Winer has continually been pushing the concept and potential of synchronized reading lists. Added info (thanks @DaveWiner): 12 Years ago, he implemented the feature in web publishing product Radio Userland.

His most recent outlining project Fargo supports subscribing to web-based OPML files by inclusion. Read how this feature works in the blogpost “Subscribe” to OPML Lists in Fargo (May 22nd, 2014), as explained by fervent Fargo user Jeffrey @Kishner.

2005: BlogBridge announces dynamic reading list support

By the end of 2005, a full-fledged version of dynamic reading lists was implemented in BlogBridge. Cross-platform, open-source and an info-junkie’s wet dream, Blogbridge unfortunately succumbed to the heavy pull of Google Reader’s gravitation.

Although as a product it is no longer available, the BlogBridge blog archive is still reminiscent of what it means to develop a top-notch, user-focused news aggregator and what hurdles the developers needed to overcome. See this post from November 2005, in which BlogBridge founder Pito Salas announced the upcoming reading lists feature in Reading Lists: Major new capability, coming soon.

To the next level of InoReader’s Dynamic OPML Subscriptions feature

Here is my wish list:

1. Right now, InoReader offers OPML files for individual folders and for a user’s entire subscription list. A logical in-between product would be to offer OPML files for bundles – a custom combination of several folders.

2. While in the InoReader user interface, people should be able to add new OPML subscription lists hosted on FeedShare.net. Similarly, they themselves should be able to publish their reading lists to FeedShare.net and make them publicly available there.

3. InoReader should add a recommendation system for subscription lists. Once the system understands what topics a user is interested in, it could recommend suggested reading lists.

About InoReader

InoReader is a fast and powerful web-based RSS service that has become increasingly popular over the past year. It has become my preferred feed reader in early 2014.

For InoReader, the frequent operations of sorting, tagging, renaming and organizing feeds and folders are frictionless actions. Productivity features such as in-context search, Active Search feeds and feed notification rules all work smoothly and fast. The collection of InoReader dashboard gadgets is growing by the week. The service has a strong focus on social features such as feed-item tagging, favoriting and commenting and of course integrates with dozens of web services. You can even configure your own custom Send To apps, or become the publisher of a channel that broadcasts among your InoReader peers.

Unique about InoReader is also that it provides public HTML / RSS / OPML output at the folder level. Lastly, I’ve personally experienced that the InoReader support team truly excels at dealing with support questions and feature requests. I’m honored and very grateful that the InoReader development team embraced my suggestion to implement Dynamic OPML Subscriptions.

In just a few steps musicians can benefit from applying QR codes to tag their printed sheet music. The QR codes enrich the score they are studying by linking it to relevant online information, such as recorded performances and background information. A smartphone capable of scanning QR codes is essential in this method.

In my spare time I very much like to study playing the piano. I particularly get passionate about specific challenging pieces from composers such as Schubert, Grieg and Chopin. Although my old piano teachers probably wouldn’t have approved, I usually start by locating online recordings of these favorite compositions. That way I get a feel of what they ideally should or could sound like straight from the beginning.

I have found QR codes to be a powerful and versatile instrument [!] to facilitate the process of familiarizing oneself with a musical piece. To start with a spoiler and to pique your interest, here’s a picture of what a piano score might look like with a QR code attached to it:

In this post I’d like to present a simple outline of what steps to take and what preparations are required to get you started. As you can see from the screenshot, I picked the romantic song Butterfly from Edvard Grieg’s 10-volume Lyric Pieces.

At some point you’ll notice that I link my QR code samples to recordings on YouTube. Once you understand the process, you can easily substitute any other service of your liking.

If you feel inclined to do so, please feel free to scan the QR code on the right to get a feel for the possibilities. Otherwise, hang in for a quick three-step tutorial:

The Three-step Process

Delivr.com QR code input form

Get familiar with a QR code generator. My personal favorite is the web service Delivr.com. Besides being slick, simple and straightforward, there’s no need to sign-up to get started. If you do sign up, you can explore their advanced features and build sophisticated, mobile-friendly landing pages. The Delivr bookmarklet— a convenient button on your browser toolbar— turns the process of creating a QR code into a swift and painless effort.

Install a QR reader on your smartphone if you haven’t got one already. I’m quite pleased with QuickMark. QR readers for a couple of well known smartphone brands are listed here: http://www.techrefined.com/help/

Experiment with creating, printing and scanning QR codes until you feel familiar with the process. I print my labels by opening the PNG version in a separate browser tab, and then tweak my printer settings and the page set-up until I get it right. Pretty much any regular printer will do. I use a Dymo LabelWriter to print my labels, as this allows me to print QR code labels one by one at size 25 mm x 25 mm – just right for sheet music. Some smartphone QR readers require a larger size, depending on their camera resolution.

Let’s assume that you’ve created a QR code using Delivr.com. Here’s what the Delivr QR preview-and-share interface looks like:

The Delivr preview-and-share interface

Apart from creating a bare-bones QR code, Delivr.com also allows you to create full-fledged mobile landing pages. You do need to create an account with the service to access additional features, such as descriptions, hyperlinks, a comments section and social-media sharing links. Here’s a screenshot of what the Grieg Butterfly landing page looks like after someone scans my Grieg Butterfly QR code. The blue parts are hyperlinks:

Delivr mobile landing page

Pretty cool, don’t you think?

Users

Several types of users might benefit from using QR codes:

Music schools, music conservatories, teachers and their students

Professional and amateur musicians, singers, directors, composers

Sheet music publishers and distributors of digital sheet music can offer their client base additional info. QR code tracking can be of interest to them. A QR code can also be useful from a copyright point of view.

Besides linking to a YouTube video, you could also consider any of the following music-related target pages. Maybe the following list inspires you to find your own sources. Where possible, I’ve linked to web pages and services related to Grieg’s Butterfly piece. Note that many web services now offer mobile-friendly interfaces to their sites, for example Mobile YouTube and Mobile Wikipedia.

QR Code Demystified – a 6-part (!) discussion of anything a web developer would want to know about QR codes, by Jason Brown

QRDressCode – very cool Scoop.it! curated by QRboy Laurent Sanchez from the refreshing French QR code blog QRDressCode (RSS) Even if you don’t speak French, the images are a treat to the eye.

Conclusion

I hope this explanation inspires you to experiment with QR codes. Maybe you’d rather use a different QR code generator, or a different QR code scanner on your phone—it doesn’t matter because the mechanism of linking a real-world object to the online world remains the same. Do feel free to contribute your ideas in the comments section.

In Meet Nick Halstead the Founder of Tweetmeme from July 14th, Loic Le Meur publishes a five-minute video interview with TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead. One particular fragment of the interview strikes me with disbelief. My post here explains why I am less than amused.

At just after 4 minutes, Loic asks Nick:

“Where did you get the idea, for the first time?”

Nick responds:

“We, err, we just looked at Twitter, we, the, err , a year ago we actually had a first pass of the website, and we kind of let it languish, and then we saw how big Twitter was getting in January and we took all the technology from the bit built in the company for the year before, and we just took all that and rebuilt it, really, you know, really quickly. “

Now, in contrast to the video, look at this compilation of several tweets from the very early days of TweetMeme’s inception, starting January 5th, 2008:

Many people know that the original idea for TweetMeme came from me. Almost immediately after I hinted at the creation of a TweetMeme service in January 2008, Nick Halstead picked up the idea, and contacted me over Twitter DM. He was enthused and kindly asked my permission to go ahead with the idea. Nick would register the tweetmeme.com domain name and would also claim the @TweetMeme account on Twitter. That evening, we had an intense Skype call and several subsequent chats about the direction of TweetMeme. We also discussed my future remuneration once the service would gain funding, though at that time it didn’t seem likely at all that this type of service would become highly popular. Nick kept me posted continually during the first development phase.

“This project has only possible because of help from a number of very talented people. So let me first thank Marjolein Hoekstra who first twittered about the concept and since then has been a constant sounding board for the project.”

Nick is correct. On just about every new feature launched since the day that TweetMeme started, I posted several tweets in a row, contacted A-list bloggers to see if they were interested, and over-all made sure people knew something very powerful was being built on top of the Twitter API. I provided Nick with very detailed and constructive feedback on how to improve TweetMeme.

In March of this year I helped Nick get Alltop founder Guy Kawasaki’s attention so that he would incorporate the TweetMeme blog feed on his Alltop Twitter category page.

When Nick Halstead urged me to have that credit footnote changed, I obliged immediately because I was made to believe he was going to get into serious trouble with his investors if they’d find out I was involved and might stake an IP claim. I was totally wiped out for days.

Let me summarize how I look at the situation: Nick and his team have pulled off a remarkable job building TweetMeme into a very solid, thriving company and though for obvious reasons I don’t tweet about TweetMeme much anymore, I still value and respect their work highly. However, in the video interview with Loic it seems Nick is denying my original inspiration and subsequent involvement in the development of TweetMeme completely.

My goal with this post is two-fold: to set the record straight about my exact role in the product and also to encourage Nick Halstead to openly come to terms about this. I propose we settle adequately and appropriately and then move on—as decent professionals would. Appropriate actions would comprise of a proper credit statement on the TweetMeme About page describing my role, and adequate recognition of my initiating role in public company statements. If a check arrives in the mail, I’ll happily cash it.

“Agglom’s basic function is that you can publish your current browser session to the web, requiring little more than a single click…. The saved session then becomes available in three formats: as a web page that displays the links, as a URL slideshow, and as an RSS feed.”

Every couple of weeks I scan Mozilla’s Firefox Add-on site for new additions. I’m especially attracted to the ones that affect browser tab behavior. Last week, while I was actually looking for a Firefox 3.0 compatible alternative to SessionSaver, a little gem popped up that I hadn’t come across before: Agglomerator. Contrary to many browser add-ons that I only keep enabled on my system for a few hours, I’m finding Agglomerator and accompanying service Agglom.com promising enough to stay.

Agglom’s basic function is that you can publish your current browser session to the web, requiring little more than a single mouse click. Shared links can be multi-media or just plain web pages. I created a simple one from Chris Brogan’s personal-branding posts. An even richer example of what Agglom is capable of doing is this Agglom set I found, with videos, photos, links and other resources about Olympic ‘pool shark’ Michael Phelps.

Agglom hands-on
If you’d like to experience hands-on what Agglom can do for you, just read this paragraph. Start by signing up for an account on the Agglom service. Then, install the Agglomerator add-on and restart your browser. Now a new, modest toolbar button becomes available, labeled “Share session”.

Next, make sure you have a bunch of tabs open that you’d like to save as an organized set. Press the Agglom button to save any or all of the tabs you currently have open, then label this custom tab set with a title of your choosing, assign tags as you see fit and lastly publish the set as a private or public list. The saved session then becomes available in three formats: as a web page that displays the links, as a URL slideshow, and as an RSS feed.

Agglom slideshows
Besides the ease with which you can publish collections of URLs, I am particularly impressed with how slideshows are implemented in Agglom. Any set you create on Agglom automatically has a slideshow attached to it that uses the original URLs. At the moment Agglom slideshows are not progressing automatically. From what I understand the Agglom developer is planning to add this feature, depending on user feedback. Here’s what the Agglom slideshow interface looks like:

What else?
Agglom sessions can be easily changed: you can change the sort order of the links by drag and drop, you can add new links and remove old ones, change their title and URL and adjust the privacy settings.
Public Agglom session links can be accessed through their URL by anyone—no Agglom account is required. Agglom users can leave comments on the lists that you share and even submit suggestions for improvements to the owner of any list. Here’s what an Agglom page looks like in edit mode, in this case for an Agglom set I created from David Tebbutt’s series of posts on how to handle the press, Media Skills 101:

Company background
Agglom is the prodigy brainchild of 23-yr old Enrico Foschi, an Italian web developer living in Bray, a town close to Dublin, Ireland. Enrico launched the first version of Agglom just over a month ago and has improved the service at an amazing pace since then. Here’s a 3-minute video from Agglom’s early days, in which Enrico explains what the service does:

Suggested improvementsRealizing Agglom was only launched fairly recently, I am already much impressed by its current feature set. In the past few days Agglom developer Enrico displayed a remarkable flexibility in not just listening to and rephrasing the suggestions I made, but even more so by implementing the majority of the improvement ideas we generated together. Yet, there are a few aspects of Agglom that deserve attention:

Unclutter the web site. Agglom offers lots of functionality. New users might be overwhelmed by the many links, icons and other pieces of information.

Leave out the advertisement for the Agglomerator add-on when a user has already got that add-on installed.

Replace the current list of bookmarking service in the sidebar by one generic link to a service like ShareThis.